In a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, each base station may be assigned a Physical Cell Identifier (PCI) and number of PCI may be limited to five hundred and four unique values for a network operator. Hence, each of Serving Base Station (SBS) and Target Neighboring Base Station (TNBS) may be identified by the unique Physical Cell Identifier (PCI). In case of supporting larger number of (>504) Base Stations (BS), “reuse” of same PCI for a plurality of BSs have been in practice. During User Equipment (UE) start-up, the UE may use the received PCI values to synchronize (time) with the potential SBS. During start up, the received PCI values may be used by the UE for channel estimation (channel quality) with respect to each of the Neighboring Base Station (NBS). In a scenario, if the PCI values of SBS and at least one of the Neighboring Base Station (NBS) as received by an UE is same, then such a scenario may be detected as a PCI collision. PCI collision among BSs can lead to high level of signal interference (interference margin) for an UE thus leading to signal decoding error at the UE that is likely to impact channel estimation by the UE. This may result either in service quality impact due to incorrect data decoding and/or unnecessary initiation of handover.
Conventional PCI collision detection systems rely only on the signal strength received from different neighbor cells for PCI configuration and for PCI reuse. This does not however ensure that the interference is minimized. Further, the problem is aggravated when UEs are geographically located in different places unevenly in the coverage area of the SBS. PCI allocation based on the Primary Synchronization Signal (PSS) and Secondary Synchronization Signal (SSS) does not provide the guarantee that the interference between cells will be minimum. Traditionally, the PCI values are pre-configured during deployment of the new base station in the network. In the existing art, automatic neighbor relations (ANR) function are being executed by Serving Base Station (SBS), by analyzing received UE measurement reports, to detect PCI collision. In state of art mechanisms, the SBS may determine if the detected duplicate PCI values have same or different E-UTRAN Cell Global Identifier (ECGI). If ECGI values are different, then SBS may identify a PCI collision. However, PCI collision detection based on UE measurement report and associated ECGI values is likely to lead to collision detection even when the PCI values are same and the signal interference level is within limits (do not impact UE level Quality of Service). In such a scenario, such undesired collision detection may lead to unnecessary PCI reconfiguration. Moreover, state of art mechanisms requires the presence of X2 connection.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of described systems with some aspects of the present disclosure, as set forth in the remainder of the present application and with reference to the drawings.